25 Years of collaboration with Heidelberger Druckmaschinen

It has now been a quarter of a century since the market leader in offset printing presses turned to INOSOFT to implement the Windows XP operating system company-wide. Since then, we have enjoyed a friendly working relationship through all the ups and downs, which we are celebrating today on a small scale.

To this occasion, we look back on the milestones of our 25-year collaboration together with Martin Eyer, responsible for desktop management at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen.

It all began with our first major joint project: the rollout of Windows XP at the headquarters in Wiesloch and various international locations. For the conversion of 25,000 clients, we developed an application that used a wizard and Norton Ghost as an imaging tool to transfer images from a preconfigured DVD to the computers.

Overview of the development of migration tools:

• Heidelberg Client Installation Wizard: As a replacement for the initial wizard, we built a tool that could restore images from a USB drive.

• Automation: In the next stage, a tool for automated installation was added. It provided the installation wizard with client PC information from an MSSQL database via a SOAP web service. In this version, the images could be transferred from a network share to the PCs for the first time.

• Windows Vista & .Net 4: The first major redesign of the wizard was necessary with the rollout of Windows Vista. Since Microsoft had discontinued the .Net 2 branch, we converted the solution to the .Net 4 framework.

• Windows 7 & Bitlocker: With the rollout of Windows 7, the Bitlocker functionality was also integrated into the assistance tools.

• Further migrations: In the following years, the tools were continuously developed to support the migrations to Windows 8, 10, and 11.

• Current status: The latest development is the conversion of the assistance systems to .Net 4.8 and the connection to Microsoft Azure as a storage location for the images.

We are proud of our long-standing, successful collaboration and look forward to supporting Heidelberger Druckmaschinen in future projects.

September 25, 2025